Nowadays, we are surrounded by artifacts that are capable of adaptive behavior, such as electric pots, boiler timers, automatic doors, and robots. The literature concerning human beings’ conceptions of “traditional” artifacts is vast, however, little is known about our conceptions of behaving artifacts, nor of the influence of the interaction with such artifacts on cognitive development, especially among children. Since these artifacts are provided with an artificial “mind,” it is of interest to assess whether and how children develop a Theory of Artificial Mind (ToAM) which is distinct from their Theory of Mind (ToM). The study examined a new theoretical scheme named ToAM (Theory of Artificial Mind) by means of qualitative and quantitative methodology among twenty four 5-7 year old children from central Israel. It also examined the effects of interacting with behaving artifacts (constructing versus observing the robot’s behavior) using the “RoboGan” interface on children’s development of ToAM and their ToM and looked for conceptions that evolve among children while interacting with behaving artifacts which are indicative of the acquisition of ToAM. In the quantitative analysis it was found that the interaction with behaving artifacts, whether as observers or constructors and for both age groups, brought into awareness children’s ToM as well as influenced their ability to understand that robots can behave independently and based on external and environmental conditions. In the qualitative analysis it was found that participating in the intervention influenced the children’s ToAM for both constructors and for the younger observer. Engaging in building the robot’s behavior influenced the children’s ability to explain several of the robots’ behaviors, their understanding of the robot’s script-based behavior and rule-based behavior and the children’s metacognitive development. The theoretical and practical importance of the study is discussed.

Can questions sent to Open-Educational-Resource (OER) websites such as Ask-An-Expert serve as indicators for students’ interest in science? This issue was examined using an online questionnaire which included an equal number of questions about the topics “space” and “nutrition” randomly selected from three different sources: a 5th-grade science textbook, the “Ask-An-Expert” website, and questions collected from other students in the same age group. A sample of 113 5th-graders from two elementary schools were asked to rate their interest level in finding out the answer to these questions without knowledge of their source. Significant differences in students’ interest level were found between questions: textbook questions were ranked lowest for both subjects, and questions from the open-resource were ranked high. This finding suggests that questions sent to an open-resource could be used as an indicator of students’ interest in science. In addition, the high correlation of interests expressed by students from the two schools may point to a potential generalization of the findings. This study contributes by highlighting OER as a new and promising indicator of student interest, which may help bring “student voices” into mainstream science teaching to increase student interest in science.

Teacher-student relationships are vital for academic and social development of students, for teachers’ professional and personal development, and for having a supportive learning environment. In the digital age, these relationships can extend beyond bricks and mortar and beyond school hours. Specifically, these relationships are extended today while teachers and students communicate via social networking sites (SNS). This paper characterizes differences between teachers (N=160) and students (N=587) who are willing to connect with their students/teachers via Facebook and those who do not wish to connect. The quantitative research reported here within is based on data collection of personal characteristics, attitudes towards Facebook, and perceptions of teacher-student relationship. Findings suggest differences in characteristics of the two groups (willing to connect vs. not willing to connect) within both populations (teachers and students). Also, in both populations, those who were willing to connect, compared to those who were not willing to connect, present more positive attitudes towards using Facebook for teaching/learning and are more opposed to a banning policy of student-teacher SNS-based communication. We also found that students who were willing to connect showed a greater degree of closeness with their teachers compared to those who were not willing to connect. This study may assist policymakers when setting up regulations regarding teacher-student communication via social networking sites.

Transforming a school from traditional teaching and learning to a one-to-one (1:1) classroom, in which a teacher and students have personal digital devices, inevitably requires changes in the way the teacher addresses her role. This study examined the implications of integrating 1:1 computing on teachers’ pedagogical perceptions and the classroom’s educational discourse. A change in pedagogical perceptions during three years of teaching within this model was investigated. The research analyzed data from 14 teachers teaching in a junior high school in the north of Israel collected over the course of three years through interviews and lesson observations. The findings show that the 1:1 computing allows teachers to improve their teaching skills; however, it fails to change their fundamental attitudes in regard to teaching and learning processes. It was further found that the use of a laptop by each student does not significantly improve the classroom’s learning discourse. The computer is perceived as an individual or group learning technology rather than as a tool for conducting learning discourse. An analysis of the data collected shows a great contribution to collaboration among teachers in preparing technology-enhanced lessons. The findings are discussed in terms of Bruner’s (Olson & Bruner, 1996) “folk psychology” and “folk pedagogy” of teachers and “the new learning ecology” framework in 1:1 classroom (Lee, Spires, Wiebe, Hollebrands, & Young, 2015). One of the main recommendations of this research is to reflect on findings from the teaching staff and the school community emphasizing 1:1 technology as a tool for significant pedagogical change. It seems that the use of personal technology per se is not enough for pedagogical changes to take place; the change must begin with teachers’ perceptions and attitudes.

Implementing inquiry in the outdoors introduces many challenges for teachers, some of which can be dealt with using mobile technologies. For productive use of these technologies, teachers should be provided with the opportunity to develop relevant knowledge and practices. In a professional development (PD) program in this design-based research, 24 teachers were involved in adaptation of a learning environment supporting inquiry in the outdoors that included the use of mobile technologies. They first experienced the learning environment as learners, then adapted it for their own use, and finally, enacted the adapted environment with peers. We examined the scope and character of teacher involvement in adaptation, and the consequent professional growth, by analyzing observations, questionnaires, interviews and the adapted learning-environments. Findings indicate that all teachers demonstrated change processes, including changes in knowledge and practice, but the coherence of the learning environments decreased when substantial adaptations were made. Some teachers demonstrated professional growth, as reflected by their implementation of ideas learned in the PD program in their daily practice, long after the PD program had ended. This study demonstrates how the Teachers as Designers approach can support teacher learning and illustrates productive use of scaffolds for teacher growth and professional development.

Self-efficacy is essential to learning but what happens when learning is done as a result of a collective process? What is the role of individual self-efficacy in collective problem solving? This research examines the manifestation of self-efficacy in prediction markets that are configured as collective problem-solving platforms and whether self-efficacy of traders affects the collective outcome. Prediction markets are collective-intelligence platforms that use a financial markets mechanism to combine knowledge and opinions of a group of people. Traders express their opinions or knowledge by buying and selling “stocks” related to questions or events. The collective outcome is derived from the final price of the stocks. Self-efficacy, one’s belief in his or her ability to act in a manner that leads to success, is known to affect personal performance in many domains. To date, its manifestation in computer-mediated collaborative environments and its effect on the collective outcome has not been studied. In a controlled experiment, 632 participants in 47 markets traded a solution to a complex problem, a naïve framing of the knapsack problem. Contrary to earlier research, we find that technical and functional self-efficacy perceptions are indistinguishable, probably due to a focus on outcomes rather than on resources. Further, results demonstrate that prediction markets are an effective collective problem-solving platform that correctly aggregates individual knowledge and is resilient to traders’ self-efficacy.

In recent years, schools (as well as universities) have added cyber security to their computer science curricula. This topic is still new for most of the current teachers, who would normally have a standard computer science background. Therefore the teachers are trained and then teaching their students what they have just learned. In order to explore differences in both populations’ learning, we compared measures of software quality and security between high-school teachers and students. We collected 109 source files, written in Python by 18 teachers and 31 students, and engineered 32 features, based on common standards for software quality (PEP 8) and security (derived from CERT Secure Coding Standards). We use a multi-view, data-driven approach, by (a) using hierarchical clustering to bottom-up partition the population into groups based on their code-related features and (b) building a decision tree model that predicts whether a student or a teacher wrote a given code (resulting with a LOOCV kappa of 0.751). Overall, our findings suggest that the teachers’ codes have a better quality than the students’ – with a sub-group of the teachers, mostly males, demonstrate better coding than their peers and the students – and that the students’ codes are slightly better secured than the teachers’ codes (although both populations show very low security levels). The findings imply that teachers might benefit from their prior knowledge and experience, but also emphasize the lack of continuous involvement of some of the teachers with code-writing. Therefore, findings shed light on computer science teachers as lifelong learners. Findings also highlight the difference between quality and security in today’s programming paradigms. Implications for these findings are discussed.

Teaching object-oriented programming to students in an in-classroom environment demands well-thought didactic and pedagogical strategies in order to guarantee a good level of apprenticeship. To teach it on a completely distance learning environment (e-learning) imposes possibly other strategies, besides those that the e-learning model of Open University of Portugal dictates. This article analyses the behavior of the students of the 1st cycle in Computer Science while interacting with the object-oriented programming (OOP) discipline available to them on the Moodle platform. Through the evaluation of the level of interaction achieved in a group of relevant selected actions by the students, it is possible to identify their relevancy to the success of the programming learning process. Data was extracted from Moodle, numerically analyzed, and, with the use of some charts, behavior patterns of students were identified. This paper points out potential new approaches to be considered in e-learning in order to enhance programming learning results, besides confirming a high level of drop-out and a low level of interaction, thus finding no clear correlation between students’ success and the number of online actions (especially in forums), which reveals a possible failure of the main pillar on which the e-learning model relies.

The current rapid technological changes confront researchers of learning technologies with the challenge of evaluating them, predicting trends, and improving their adoption and diffusion. This study utilizes a data-driven discourse analysis approach, namely culturomics, to investigate changes over time in the research of learning technologies. The patterns and changes were examined on a corpus of articles published over the past decade (2006-2014) in the proceedings of Chais Conference for the Study of Innovation and Learning Technologies – the leading research conference on learning technologies in Israel. The interesting findings of the exhaustive process of analyzing all the words in the corpus were that the most commonly used terms (e.g., pupil, teacher, student) and the most commonly used phrases (e.g., face-to-face) in the field of learning technologies reflect a pedagogical rather than a technological aspect of learning technologies. The study also demonstrates two cases of change over time in prominent themes, such as “Facebook” and “the National Information and Communication Technology (ICT) program”. Methodologically, this research demonstrates the effectiveness of a data-driven approach for identifying discourse trends over time.

ICT (Information and Communication Technologies) in teacher education poses new challenges to faculty and students. This study was carried out to examine factors facilitating and hindering ICT implementation in teacher education institutes in Israel. Findings from our study, administered at two points in time, revealed that providing technological-pedagogical support to teacher educators and their perceptions and beliefs regarding ICT usage were consistent with being either facilitating or hindering factors in the integration process in colleges of education. Professional development of teacher educators in ICT skills and guidance in applying advanced technologies are additional facilitating factors. Resources, mainly time and infrastructure, were mostly a hindering factor with adverse influence on ICT integration. Three levels of successful ICT integration indicated successful implementation: teacher educators’ level, students in their practice, and the organization level in terms of policy.

The characteristics of successful MOOCs were explored in this study. Thousands of student reviews regarding five xMOOCs (Massive Open Online Course) in the fields of software, science, and management were extracted from the Coursetalk website and analyzed by quantitative and qualitative methods using the Garrison, Anderson, and Archer (2000) Community of Inquiry (CoI) model. The 14 characteristics found to contribute to the success of MOOCs (e.g., teacher, atmosphere, exercise) were partitioned into the teaching, social, and cognitive presence elements. In addition, cluster analysis revealed five types of learners, based on the characteristics they mentioned for course success: atmosphere, exercise, teacher, exam, and unspecified. This divides learners into groups that may prefer social, cognitive, or teaching presence. The findings of this study negate the perception that xMOOCs mostly contain teaching presence elements. This research contributes to the understanding of characteristics that contribute to successful MOOCs and sheds light on the students, too. Listening to the voices of the students and the types of characteristics that they chose to mention, enables further exploration of their preferences and expectations regarding MOOCs and, accordingly, to future adaptation between students’ preferences and MOOC characteristics.

CAPTCHA is one of the most common solutions to check if the user trying to enter a Website is a real person or an automated piece of software. This challenge-response test, implemented in many Internet Websites, emphasizes the gaps between accessibility and security on the Internet, as it poses an obstacle for the learning-impaired in the reading and comprehension of what is presented in the test. Various types of CAPTCHA tests have been developed in order to address accessibility and security issues. The objective of this study is to investigate how the differences between various CAPTCHA tests affect user experience among populations with and without learning disabilities. A questionnaire accompanied by experiencing five different tests was administered to 212 users, 60 of them with learning disabilities. Response rates for each test and levels of success were collected automatically. Findings suggest that users with learning disabilities have more difficulties in solving the tests, especially those with distorted texts, have more negative attitudes towards the CAPTCHA tests, but the response time has no statistical difference from users without learning disabilities. These insights can help to develop and implement solutions suitable for many users and especially for population with learning disabilities.

This study examined the phenomenon of academic dishonesty among university students. It was based on Pavela’s (1997) framework of types of academic dishonesty (cheating, plagiarism, fabrication, and facilitation) and distinguished between digital and “traditional”- analog dishonesty. The study analyzed cases of academic dishonesty offenses committed by students, as well as the reasons for academic dishonesty behaviors, and the severity of penalties for violations of academic integrity. The motivational framework for committing an act of academic dishonesty (Murdock & Anderman, 2006) and the Self-Concept Maintenance model (Mazar, Amir, & Ariely, 2008) were employed to analyze the reasons for students’ dishonest behaviors. We analyzed 315 protocols of the Disciplinary Committee, at The Open University of Israel, from 2012-2013 that represent all of the offenses examined by the Committee during one and a half years. The findings showed that analog dishonesty was more prevalent than digital dishonesty. According to the students, the most prevalent reason for their academic dishonesty was the need to maintain a positive view of self as an honest person despite violating ethical codes. Interestingly, penalties for analog dishonesty were found to be more severe than those imposed for digital dishonesty. Surprisingly, women were penalized more severely than men, despite no significant gender differences in dishonesty types or in any other parameter explored in the study. Findings of this study shed light on the scope and roots of academic dishonesty and may assist institutions in coping effectively with this phenomenon.

As a result of the rapid development of Information and Communication Technology (ICT) and the growing interest in Internet-based tools for language classroom, it has become a pressing need for educators to locate, evaluate and select the most appropriate language-learning digital resources that foster more communicative and meaningful learning processes. Hence, this paper describes a mixed research project that, on the first hand, aimed at proposing a Checklist for evaluating language websites built on the principles of the Communicative Approach, and on the second hand, sought to strengthen the teachers’ Knowing-how-to-do skill as part of their digital competence. To achieve these goals, a four-phase research procedure was followed that included reviewing relevant literature and administering qualitative and quantitative research methods to participants (i.e., language teachers, an expert in the Computer-Assisted Language Learning (CALL) field and a college professor) in order to gain insights into problematic issues and, thereafter, to contribute to the creation and validation of the Checklist model and the Study Guide. The findings revealed that: (a) evaluating language websites leads to the enhancement of the teachers’ practical skills and their knowledge of the technological language; and (b) having an assessment instrument allows educators to choose the materials that best meet their communicative teaching purposes.

The purpose of this research is the exploration of the opinions and level of self-efficacy in the usage of Information Communication Technologies (ICTs) of teachers in Greek pre-schools in the learning process and administration of nurseries. By using the term “usage and utilisation of ICTs in the learning process” we mean the utilisation of the capabilities that new technologies offer in an educationally appropriate way so that the learning process yields positive results. By using the term “self-efficacy” we describe the strength of one’s belief in one’s own ability to use the capabilities he or she possess. In this way, the beliefs of the person in his or her ability to use a personal computer constitute the self-efficacy in computer usage. The research sample consists of 128 pre-school teachers that work in the prefecture of Kavala. Kavala’s prefecture is a representative example of an Education Authority since it consists of urban, suburban, and rural areas. The approach that is deemed to be the most appropriate for the exploration of such research questions is content analysis methodology and correlation analysis. The main findings of the study have shown statistically significant differences regarding the opinions and stances of the pre-school teachers for the introduction of the ICTs in the administration and the usage and utilisation of ICTs in the administration and preparation of teaching. Lastly, there were statistically significant differences between the opinions and stances of the pre-school teachers for the usage and utilisation of ICTs in the learning process. Instead, there were no statistically significant differences regarding the level of self-efficacy of the pre-school teachers in the usage and utilisation of the ICTs in the learning process. The research results could be used in the educational field as well as by Greek Ministry of Education, Research and Religious Affairs in order to take any corrective action, after the effort of Greek Ministry of Education, Research and Religious Affairs, to integrate ICT in the learning process with training courses since 2006.

Aim/Purpose: As online video lectures rapidly gain popularity in formal and informal learning environments, one of their main challenges is student retention. This study investigates the influence of adding interactivity to online video lectures on students’ attention span. Background: Interactivity is perceived as increasing the attention span of learners and improving the quality of learning. However, interactivity may be regarded as an interruption, which distracts students. Furthermore, adding interactive elements to online video lectures requires additional investment of various resources. Therefore, it is important to investigate the impact of adding interactivity to online video lectures on the attention span of learners. Methodology: This study employed a learning analytics approach, obtained data from Google Analytics, and analyzed data of two Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) that were developed by the Open University of Israel in order to make English for academic purposes (EAP) courses freely accessible. Contribution: The paper provides important insights, based on quantitative empirical research, on: integrating interactive elements in online videos; the impact of video length; and differences between two groups of advanced and basic learners. Furthermore, it demonstrates how learning analytics may be used for improving instructional design. Findings: The findings suggest that interactivity may increase the attention span of learners, as measured by the average online video lecture viewing completion percentage, before and after the addition of interactivity. However, when the lecture is longer than about 15 minutes, the completion percentages decrease, even after adding interactive elements. Recommendations for Practitioners: Adding interactivity to online video lectures and controlling their length is expected to increase the attention span of learners. Recommendation for Researchers: Learning analytics is a powerful quantitative methodology for identifying ways to improve learning processes. Impact on Society: Providing practical insights on mechanisms for increasing the attention span of learners is expected to improve social inclusion. Future Research: Discovering further best practices to improve the effectiveness of online video lectures for diverse learners.